This piece by Howard V. Brown was the preliminary painting for the cover of Astounding Stories, June 1934.

This preliminary is extremely similar to the final piece but varies in a few subtle ways. For example: the number and direction of the spaceship beams, the spaceship tail is different, and the size of the preliminary is smaller than the original painting.

Condition report: Only two small pieces chipped off in the main ships rocket exhaust and a small pressure mark in the same area that does not break color. See pictures for more detail.

Howard V Brown was a renowned artist who helped set the standard for Science Fiction cover art. Along with Frank R Paul. HW Wesso and Leo Morey, Brown is one of the "Big Four" of science fictions illustrators of the 1930s. Brown produced copious amounts of art work, his first published work was for illustrations he did throughout 6 volumes of educational text written by Katharine Elizabeth Dopp.

Prior to his work with SF pulps, Brown produced covers for Scientific American magazine spanning from about 1913 to 1931. It was on the Oct 1933 issue of Astounding Stories that Brown published his first SF cover, and up until John W Campbell took over as editor in 1938, Brown was the predominant cover artist for Astounding.

By the end of his SF cover art career, Brown amassed 90 total covers from the early 1930s to the early 1940s.